Kaffeemitte

NADINE SCHERER / Graphite on paper
Nadine had been to Italy before May 2025, but she didn’t know Umbria. The year before, she had been looking for an artist-in-residence program so that she could concentrate on her work outside Berlin for a while. It was important to her that the location was rural and surrounded by nature.
A friend had found a flyer in a café and told Nadine about the Utopiaggia residency. The rural location, around 30km from Perugia, and the residency’s connection to a commune that has existed nearby since the ‚80s, made her curious. Nadine is interested in alternative ways of living, community structures, and how artistic life in the countryside can be organized. During her stay, the weather was rainy and cool; quite different from what she had expected. Nevertheless, or perhaps because of this, Nadine found the time to be particularly focused and work-intensive. She went hiking, made sketches, and worked them out later into paintings and illustrations. Her series in the current exhibition is also presented following this structure: from the outside, landscape and environment, moving step by step inward, to the house itself. The eight pictures from the series are notes in her diary: impressions from two weeks in Umbria. They were created while exploring the woods around the village of Greppolischieto, a former school camp, and the commune. Nadine plans to apply to Utopiaggia again in the future. For her next stay, she wants to focus her artistic attention on the community: on the networks surrounding the school and the commune, on how people live there, and how their everyday lives are embedded in the Umbrian landscape. She feels that there is still much for her to discover.

GREGOR HUTZ / Digitally altered, high-res drone shots
“Casa del Mobile” / 2025 Pantalla & Berlin
Umbria was my home until I was eight years old. Since then, I have maintained a lifelong connection to the area. I have returned at least once a year—to visit my father, who lived near San Venanzo until 2015; today, I continue to return as a filmmaker, photographer and freestyle pomologist.”
“Pantalla does not look as picturesque as other towns in the Monti Martani or Monte Peglia, which rise along the slopes of the Tiber Valley. The valley itself, through which the Strada Statale runs, does not meet classic postcard standards. However, if we move beyond ‘beauty’ as a criterion for architecture and prefer the ‘interesting’ instead, buildings from the recent past take on a new light.
When they show patina and a character of their own, they become wonderful additions to a multi-millennial history of civilization in the region.
chiusa

UNSHIELDED by Gabriel Denaes
Vienna 2024 / Agfa Agfamatic 2000, using 2021 LomoChrome Metropolis 110 ISO 100–400 film
Parallel to the trend of using AI to generate images, an increasing number of artists are deliberately embracing analogue technology. This creates a distinct aesthetic and places stronger emphasis on the artistic process itself—a development that may also apply to other areas of life and to contemporary art in particular. That is why this edition of the group show once again features an analogue photograph: UNSHIELDED by photographer and educator Gabriel Denaes. The story begins about twenty years ago, with the technical innovation of digital cameras that simplified photography. Soon after, the constant availability of cameras led to countless decent photos, which spread inflationarily across the internet. In this way, a new visual language emerged—together with a new type of photographer: the blogger or content creator, skilled at dancing with the algorithm. With the introduction of AI into image creation in the past two years, this development has taken another turn. Today, the reasons for taking a photograph at all—especially with all the hurdles of analogue photography in contrast to the simplicity of AI image generation—must be completely reconsidered. The fact that these supposed disadvantages of “handmade art” are increasingly becoming something artists consciously seek out is beautifully evident in Gabriel Denaes’ image. The technical error, caused by incorrectly inserted film, not only defines the final composition of the photograph but also confidently communicates that behind the image lies a process deliberately distancing itself from an automated visual culture.